Archive for date:
March, 2014

Published on: Monday, 31 March, 2014

Even with exaggerated assumptions of sensitivity, the IPCC has to down-grade alarm

The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
will shortly publish the second part of its latest report, on the
likely impact of climate change. Government representatives are
meeting with scientists in Japan to sex up—sorry, rewrite—a summary
of the scientists' accounts of storms, droughts and diseases to
come. But the actual report, known as AR5-WGII, is less frightening than its predecessor seven
years ago.

The 2007 report was riddled with errors about Himalayan
glaciers, the Amazon rain forest, African agriculture, water
shortages and other matters, all of which erred in the direction of
alarm. This led to a critical appraisal of the report-writing
process from a council of national science academies, some of whose
recommendations were simply ignored.

Others, however, hit home. According to leaks, this time the
full report is much more cautious and vague about
worsening cyclones, changes in rainfall, climate-change refugees,
and the overall cost of global warming.

Published on: Sunday, 23 March, 2014

It's a good thing we don't all have to dig the fields by hand

My Times column is on technology and jobs:

Bill Gates voiced a thought in a speech last week
that is increasingly troubling America’s technical elite — that
technology is about to make many, many people redundant. Advances
in software, he said, will reduce demand for jobs, substituting
robots for drivers, waiters or nurses.

The last time that I was in Silicon Valley I found the
tech-heads fretting about this in direct proportion to their
optimism about technology. That is to say, the more excited they
are that the “singularity” is near — the moment when computers
become so clever at making themselves even cleverer that the
process accelerates to infinity — the more worried they are that
there will be mass unemployment as a result.

Published on: Friday, 21 March, 2014

William Easterly's new book explores the aid industry's autocratic instincts

My book review for The Times of William Easterly's new book "The Tyranny of Experts"

Imagine, writes the economist William Easterly, that in 2010 more than 20,000 farmers in rural Ohio had been forced from their land by soldiers, their cows slaughtered, their harvest torched and one of their sons killed — all to make way for a British forestry project, financed and promoted by the World Bank. Imagine that when the story broke, the World Bank promised an investigation that never happened.

Published on: Friday, 14 March, 2014

Malaria, TB and Aids are in steady retreat

My Times column is on malaria, TB and Aids -- all
in steady decline, a fact that officials and journalists seem
reluctant to report:

There’s a tendency among public officials and
journalists, when they discuss disease, to dress good news up as
bad. My favourite example was a BBC website headline from 2004 when
mortality from the human form of mad-cow disease, which had been
falling for two years, rose from 16 to 17 cases: “Figures show rise
in vCJD deaths” wailed the headline. (The incidence fell to eight
the next year and zero by 2012, unreported.) Talk about grasping at
straws of pessimism.

Published on: Tuesday, 04 March, 2014

E-cigarettes deserve encouragement as a lesser evil

My Times column is on harm reduction, Swedish
snus and e-cigarettes:

Is this the end of smoking? Not if the bureaucrats
can help it.

Sweden’s reputation for solving policy problems,
from education to banking, is all the rage. The Swedes are also ahead of
the rest of Europe in tackling smoking. They have by far the fewest
smokers per head of population of all EU countries. Lung cancer
mortality in Swedish men over 35 is less than
half the British rate.

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